


unknown

by kittenscully



Series: fictober 2020 [12]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Developing Friendships, Episode: s01e20 Darkness Falls, F/M, Light Angst, POV Fox Mulder, Post-Episode: s01e20 Darkness Falls, Season/Series 01, philosophical musings on exploration and fear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:22:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26978044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittenscully/pseuds/kittenscully
Summary: With her flare bright hair and colorful windbreaker, she’d been like a homing signal through the trees. He’d lain in the cabin bunk and imagined following her across miles of forest.[fictober day 12]
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Series: fictober 2020 [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1949467
Comments: 6
Kudos: 44





	unknown

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: "How about you trust me for once?"

There’s no place on earth that hides as many mysteries as the Pacific Northwest. Mulder is as sure of that as he’s ever been of anything. 

Deep forest, spread dark green from the dirt to the sky, cool fog to soothe the lungs. Trees tall enough to remind a man of his insignificance. Shadowy secrets by night and endless miles of uncharted majesty by day. 

And maybe he’s targeted his explorer’s instinct towards the sky, but he’d be lying if he said he doesn’t feel that age-old pull to go west, west, west. Towards the genetic memory of the new world, and ultimately, the sea. 

Not to conquer the forest, like the loggers who’d destroyed countless acres of old growth woods and ended up bug food. No, just to see it. To experience something so much greater than himself. 

Outside the windows of the little Winthrop motel where they’re spending one final night, the green is as vast and alluring as ever. There’s no amount of pain or danger that makes him want to stop charging into it. He’s never had much care for his own safety anyway. 

But he thinks of Scully upon arrival at the logging site, hiking pole in her hand, sweet little face turned up towards the tree tops. Bouncing on the balls of her feet, excited despite herself even after the long walk. 

The only person he’s ever wanted to take by the hand and drag with him on all of his voyages, and the only one who’s ever wanted him to do it. 

He doubts that she’ll still want that now, though, not after what he’s put her through. 

“I always daydreamed about going camping out here when I was little,” she’d told him, voice hushed as if in respect for the vastness of the world. 

“You got that pioneer spirit in you, huh?” He’d nudged her with his elbow, watched her smile. 

He’d known then that she understood. 

“Adventurer spirit, more like.” 

With her flare bright hair and colorful windbreaker, she’d been like a homing signal through the trees. He’d lain in the cabin bunk and imagined following her across miles of forest. Just the three of them: Mulder, Scully and the great unknown. 

In another time, he thinks, they’d have been pioneers together, leaving behind family and safety to go west hand in hand. Too restless to settle anywhere. 

In this century, though, no one cares for explorers. They’ve gotten as close as they can by being investigators, following the trails of unexplained phenomena to their illogical conclusions. But the unexplained is uncaring when disrespected, and it is also rife with people who will crash through the wilderness and set all sorts of monsters loose. 

Scully had been so radiant with promise, so ready to scope out forest and sky. But the carelessness of others had nearly sucked all of the life out of her, left her pale and barely breathing on a containment facility bed. 

Even now, with the pink returned to her skin, she is desperately small and vulnerable to the elements. She seems to contain so much that he forgets the true scale of her, held up against the vastness of the world. 

The motel rooms don’t have heaters, and Mulder imagines her wrapped in a blanket, shivering and sitting as close as possible to the one dust-covered lamp. She’d been so near to panic in that little cabin, skin crawling with bioluminescent mites, survival instinct kicking in with a surge of wild terror. 

He wonders if she’ll be afraid of the dark, the unknown, for years to come, if she’ll quit and go back to teaching. He wonders if it’ll be his fault. 

There’s no replacing her, no other person who he’d want to dive headlong into mystery with. It’s her or solitude, the two of them or no one at all. That much he’s sure of. And adventuring alone won’t hold the same pull, not now that he knows how it feels to do it with her.

Hunched at the foot of the bed, he rubs at his temples, muscles wound tight, begging him to get up and go somewhere, anywhere but here.

But without his homing signal, without her survival instinct, he feels suddenly at risk of becoming a long lost carcass, or worse, a corpse on her autopsy table. 

Scully would grieve him through the ceremony of disassembling him. She wouldn’t let anyone else touch him. She’d mark the report with her neat signature, her lips in a tight little line, and then she’d send him off to his grave. 

And he can’t do that to her, can’t risk putting her through it. 

No, it’ll be getting so lost he can’t be found and hoping she doesn’t go looking, or never setting foot past the bounds of the known again. 

The interior walls of the little motel are wood, just like the inside of the cabin had been, cobwebs scattered in the corners. Their rooms aren’t adjoining, not this time. If they were, he has a feeling she’d have knocked and let herself in hours ago. 

As it is, he is restless as a caged animal. 

Dawn is rapidly approaching, and then they’ll be on their way to a flight back home. Only five more short hours of her, asleep on his shoulder, small and warm. After that, Mulder suspects, he’ll be on his own again, indefinitely. 

He’s never hated the company of his own thoughts more. 

In a rush of impulse, he slings his coat over his arm and pushes open the back door, stepping into the open grassy area behind the motel. The air has a damp chill to it that cleans him out as he breathes it in, and condensation is already starting to collect on his sweatshirt. 

Behind him, the rear wall of the building stretches a little ways on either side, dotted with doors just like his. Above them, small bulbs cast a halo of yellow light, each straining bravely against the darkness but left lonely, shadows creeping between. 

There’s a poetic metaphor at the back of his mind comparing them to people. He ignores it, and steps past his own illuminated circle, turning his face to the sky. 

Out here, there’s no haze of streetlights, no city smog. Only a boundless expanse of stars. His first mystery and his greatest, defying all attempts at exploration. A siren call like no other. He knows Scully would feel the call differently, but he likes to think that she feels it nonetheless. 

It’s the finality that makes him do it. A last ditch attempt, born of surety that she won’t be in his life after tomorrow. 

Her little door rattles as he raps on the window. It’s clear he hasn’t woken her when her face appears almost immediately, every bit as sleepless and nervous as his must be. 

She pushes the door open, just a crack. She’s wearing a sweatshirt too, dark blue and emblazoned with the U.S. Navy logo over one breast, and she’s tiny as a child in it. 

“What is it, Mulder?”

“C’mon out,” he says. “No bugs, I promise.”

“It’s late,” she worries. Blinks at him with those big eyes, smoothing down her fluffy hair. 

“You weren’t sleeping, were you?”

“No,” she admits. “I can’t sleep.”

“C’mon, I want you to see this,” he insists. “It’ll be worth it. Promise.”

“Our flight is in three hours, Mulder.”

“How about you trust me for once?” He means it as a joke, but realizes quickly what a bad one it is. She always does, to a fault. Even when it ends up getting her hurt.

And yet, Scully graces him with a small, tired smile anyway. There’s a pause as she disappears back out of his view, and then she’s pushing the door open the rest of the way and stepping into the chill of the night with him.

A visible shiver runs through her, and he unfolds the coat still slung across his arm without thinking twice, drapes it around her shoulders. She accepts it wordlessly, pulling it close around her. 

“What am I meant to be seeing?” She asks. 

One hand on her lower back, Mulder coaxes her to step forward, out of the light, feeling a tentative relief when she does so without hesitation. And then, he points up at the sky.

Although he’d intended to look with her, he finds himself watching her face instead, searching for any sign that she feels what he does. As she follows his finger upwards, her mouth loosens, lips parting, eyes widening further in apparent wonder. 

“Oh,” she says, softly. 

“Told you,” he says.

And there’s silence, for a little while. Her tracing constellations with her gaze, and him tracing the gentle, rounded lines of her face. 

“I miss living somewhere you can see the stars,” she whispers. As if she might disturb those stars, should she talk too loud. 

“Do you ever wonder what’s out there?” he asks. 

“Not in the way you do,” she admits, after a moment. 

His heart starts to sink into his stomach, but then, her shoulder bumps against him, as if she can feel him pulling away. 

“I grew up a sailor’s daughter,” she reminds him. “To me, the stars are a map for exploring the world we live in.” 

It isn’t what he expected her to say, but it feels as if it should’ve been. He doesn’t know quite what to make of it, a way of seeing the world so different from his own. He doesn’t know, either, whether exploring the world is something that she still wants to do.

“‘It was not meant that we should voyage far,’” Mulder quotes, almost absentmindedly. He remembers reading the line over and over again as a child, never understanding how someone could think that way. 

“‘We shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age,’” she quotes sarcastically in reply, with a soft snort. Of course she’d know the story, with its seafaring themes, as well as he does. “Lovecraft was a bastard, Mulder. He didn’t know what he was talking about.” 

“You don’t think that there are things out there, great eldritch mysteries, that are too terrible for human minds to know?” 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says, shaking her head. “If we weren’t meant to know, we wouldn’t be born curious.”

He laughs at that, watches a small, wry smile grow on her face. 

“Besides, nothing under the sky is uncharted, not really.” Scully shrugs, shifts her weight against him. “As long as you can see the stars, it’s impossible to get truly lost.” 

It’s harder to look at her, now that she’s standing closer. He finds himself turning his gaze to the sky but not really seeing it. In the murky peace of the little forest town, the loudest sound is her breathing, drifting just above the faint buzz of the lights. She smells of motel shampoo, of the clinging pine scent from the air fresheners inside. 

He feels her shiver, and wraps an arm around her shoulders. 

“Lovecraft really was a bastard,” he comments. “A racist, too.”

“And a coward,” she says. “What kind of person would write a story urging people to stop exploring, just out of the fear that they might find something truly worth remarking on?”

“Like prehistoric bioluminescent wood mites?”

“Like prehistoric bioluminescent wood mites,” Scully agrees, with a soft little laugh. “Although I could do without running into them again.”

“I’ll think twice before dragging you to the forest again,” he says, squeezing her gently. 

She turns towards him, and he looks down at her again, struck by the calm sincerity of her gaze.

“Mulder, don’t you dare,” she says. “If we hadn’t gone, no one would’ve ever been able to research those things. At least now I know that they existed, even though I don’t have proof. And besides, who knows how many more lives might’ve been lost?”

“We almost lost ours,” he points out. “Just for the sake of solving a mystery.”

“But we didn’t,” she counters. “And I don’t intend to live my life in fear. The pursuit of knowledge isn’t madness, Mulder. It’s the only reasonable thing to do when confronted with a mad, irrational world.”

And she is the luckiest thing that’s ever happened to him, he thinks. She is a marvel, so full of unexpected revelations that there’s a long moment where he can’t find anything worthwhile to say. 

“You got that pioneer spirit in you, Scully,” he remarks, finally. 

“Adventurer spirit,” she corrects him again, and he smiles. 

She turns back to look at the sky, and he doesn’t move his arm from where it’s encircling her shoulders. Faintly, she murmurs something about Cassiopeia, and he scans the treeline of the not-so-distant forest, feels the steady rhythm of her inhales and exhales and matches them with his own. 

Just the three of them, quiet and unafraid in the night. Mulder, Scully, and the great unknown.

**Author's Note:**

> The Lovecraft quotes are both from the Call of Cthulhu, which I firmly believe both of them would've had a love-hate relationship due to disagreeing with his philosophical musings.


End file.
